In general, I dislike books or papers in which atheists tell believers how they should behave or think to improve their “religion skills”. Philosophers Michael Ruse and Elliott Sober have both done this, and I find the act unseemly—like giving a bottle to an alcoholic who really needs to abstain. But I’m making an exception in the case of John Loftus’s new book (out Nov. 1), How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice From an Atheist, for, as the Amazon description below notes, it’s as likely to remove belief as to improve it.
The Christian faith has been vigorously defended with a variety of philosophical, historical, and theological arguments, but many of the arguments used in an earlier age no longer resonate in today’s educated West. Where has apologetics gone wrong? What is the best response to the growing challenge presented by scientific discovery and naturalistic thought? Unlike every work on Christian apologetics that has come before, How to Defend the Christian Faith is the first one written by an atheist for Christians. As a former Christian defender who is now a leading atheist thinker, John Loftus answers these questions and more. He tells would-be apologists how to train properly, where to study, what to study, what issues they should concern themselves with, and how poorly the professors who currently train them practice their craft. In the process, he shows readers why Christian apologists have failed to reach the intelligent nonbeliever. For those Christian apologists who think this book will provide a secret formula to convert the nonbelieving masses, be warned: as an exposé of the present state of Christian aplogetics, it can just as easily be used by atheists to refute apologetic arguments. Thus, this book presents both an opportunity and a challenge to Christians: they must either change how apologetics is done, or quit doing apologetics altogether.
In truth, you can see what it’s about from this screenshot of the contents, which I took from an advance copy.
It’s only $12.88 at Amazon U.S. What do you have to lose? (Except, perhaps, your faith!)
UPDATE: I asked John if he wanted to say a few words about the book to my readers, and he said that I should simply give this quote from the book’s Introduction:
This book is written by an atheist, a non-believer, to Christians who feel called by their God to defend their faith from the arguments of atheists like me. As someone who had formerly been trained to defend the Christian faith by some of the best recognized apologists in our generation—who now argues against it—what I’ll say should be helpful in your quest. My goal is to show Christians how to defend their faith—that is, to do apologetics—correctly, if it can be done at all. It’s also intended for atheists who want to argue Christians out of their faith, since the arguments contained within should be useful for this purpose.
The title to this book is intentionally provocative. Atheists will criticize it because there simply isn’t a way to help Christians do what it proposes, defend the indefensible. Any atheist proposing to write such a book must not be a true atheist. He’s either an unconvinced atheist, or worse, a secret believer. Perhaps he’s motivated by money? Well I assure my readers that if anyone is motivated by money, it isn’t me. And I equally assure them I have not changed my mind. I am still an intellectually committed atheist. Sufficient evidence is lacking to accept Christianity as the truth. Trying to enter into a relationship with a supernatural Being who does not exist is like trying to have a relationship with an invisible imaginary friend. Anyone who has read my other works can see why I think this way. And I stand by those works.
Christians will criticize the title of this book because I cannot be sincere in writing it. Surely I’m no more interested in helping Christians learn how to defend their faith than a vegan would produce a cookbook that included beef, chicken, pork and fish recipes. The truth is that I really am going to offer some sincere honest advice to would-be Christian apologists, especially in Part 1. I’ll also be offering a lot of snarky tongue-in-cheek advice, especially in Parts 2 and 3. I’ll offer some positive advice for what budding apologists should do, as well as negative advice—lots of it—for what they should not do. If they truly seek to challenge non-believers to accept Christianity it should be helpful to listen to me, an atheist who was trained by the best to be a Christian apologist.
Wow, those chapter titles don’t pull any punches, do they?
I worry that the combination of book title and chapter titles may put him in a bit of a ‘bait and switch’ light for some believing readers. Parts 2 and 3 aren’t really sincere attempts to do what the title of the book promises. They’re more of a “gotcha, you thought I was going to explain how to legitimately and intellectually honestly defend the faith, but really the rest of the book is about how there’s no legitimate or intellectually honest way to do that.”
Still, that’s minor complaint which only a few readers might get upset about. Overall I look forward to reading it. And nobody should be buying books based solely on title anyway.
Agreed. But this is what intelligent readers get out of actual sincere apologetics anyway, it just takes longer.
Parts 2 and 3 would definitely come across as a bait-and-switch…if he really meant this book to be a legitimate guide for would-be apologists, and I’m not at all sure he really does. I think this is a great way to frame a book whose real function is to argue for atheism. It really demonstrates, to steal a phrase from Sam Harris, “how the sausage of faith is made”. Oh…those are the ingredients? Hmm…gross.
…if he really meant this book to be a legitimate guide for would-be apologists, and I’m not at all sure he really does.
Yes, agreed. If you read the title as satire or sarcasm it delivers exactly what is promised. Not everyone who picks up the book may get the sarcasm though.
But as I said, this point doesn’t bother me too much, it was just one of the first things to strike me as I read the TOC. I’ll probably drop it in my kindle queue tonight.
Looks like a “trojan horse” to me too, which might be a good appraoch for some.
I think *one* idea would be to move the “overton window” on how apologetics themselves are seen. Maybe even get the mild Christians more outraged at their co-religionists, etc.
Oh, come on. The book’s entitled How to Defend the Christian Faith. Advice From an Atheist. Where’s the bait? Is anybody really going to think, “Yes, an atheist would really know how to defend the Christian faith.”
” bit of a ‘bait and switch’ light for some believing readers. ”
If he really wanted to deceive the reader, he could have put more innocuous chapter titles. I would interpret the book title as more ironic than deceptive.
Still, the title might turn off non-believers, and the chapter titles might turn off believers, so this could be a marketing problem for the book.
Having now read the updated intro statement Loftus wrote, I retract my quibble. Anyone reading that intro will understand what’s in the book just fine.
I agree with the point about the chapter titles. It reminds me a little bit – in concept – of the Origin of Species that some evangelical mob put out a while back with a ‘foreword’ that demolished Darwin, or tried to.
Though doubtless Loftus writes better.
cr
The table of contents of the middle section sounds like a bit of a puton. What real apologist would want to gerrymander for God?
The two blurbs at “Debunking Christianity” give different impressions of the book’s tone. David Silberman says the book will sharpen both sides, while Carolyn Hippolyte emphasizes it “exposes the intellectual bankruptcy” of Christian apologetics.
I LOVE Loftus’ Chapter 13 on the problem of God in a world of pain “Honestly Admit there are No Solutions”. Secular Amen!! Unlike a large number of Christian apologists, I regard C.S. Lewis’ “A Grief Observed” as being effectively a full retraction of his earlier “The Problem of Pain” the latter being (ironically!!) the most painful of all his books to read, and the most annoying.
(Loftus apparently is editing several anthologies that have the same titles as the four horsemen books but with “Christianity” inserted into the title, starting with “The Christian Delusion” “The End of Christianity” and a forthcoming “Christianity is not great”. Not sure what he’ll do with Dennett’s title “Breaking the Spell”.)
“Breaking the Cross”?
Haha, thanks for passing this one along. I’m going to pick it up!
The most important advice: read the damn bible! Poll after poll after poll show that atheists know more about christianity than the christians. It’s very telling when the people who think religion is a con know more about religion than the people who think it’s revealed truth.
Tis the nature of cons: they only work on people who don’t understand them.
I’m not sure where it belongs, possibly in chapter 3, or at the start of chapter 7, but a discussion of philosophy vs. sophistry would be appropriate.
“vs”?
If you have no own means to test it, how can it not be sophistry!?
I’m pleased to see that Loftus’ advice doesn’t seem to be an accomodationist recommendation that Christians best “defend” their faith when they try to avoid the meat of their arguments and concentrate instead on just being friendly, secular, and nonthreatening.
That’s not to say that being friendly, secular, and nonthreatening are bad things, of course. But they’re not strategies for making Christianity itself more reasonable and less in need of defending. All it does is protect individual Christians from direct conflict with other people, atheist or not. And while that may be a fine personal goal, it’s at best a very low bar when it comes to apologetics, and filed under “Changing the topic.”.
I’m curious about his first chapter: “The most important question of all.” While I suspect it might involve Loftus’ famous Outsider Test for Faith, my own selection for Question #1 is this one:
Do you care more if your beliefs are true – or useful?
This is really critical — and either way they answer it they’ve knocked themselves out of the capacity to use at least one giant stream of nonsense.
Since the book is “How to defend the Christian faith…” another good candidate for most important question is why do you believe?. Because if there are no rational reasons for your belief, its going to be intellectually dishonest of you to mount any rational arguments in defense of it (IOW – you’d be making arguments you personally think aren’t relevant to being a believer).
Yes, though I think my question is more basic than that one. A lot of arguments “in favor” of a belief are really just arguments for the benefits of believing, rather than the belief being true. If, as often happens, someone starts to answer your “why do you believe?” question with those sorts of arguments, it would have been useful to have established this distinction up front.
Besides, once they’re committed themselves to the pursuit of truth, faith is officially off the table.
I agree with you Sastra. That is exactly the question I have always felt was the most pertinent, and strategic, to start a dialogue with many religious believers.
I’m no public speaker, but in those times I imagine being put to the task of making the atheist case to a religious audience, say a church congregation, I always think of starting with that question: Do you care of what you believe is true or not? And if you do please raise your hand.
It’s hard to imagine anything less than a large majority of hands going up. Most would feel strange not putting their hand up.
I’d want to repeat it, narrowing it, does that include your religious beliefs – do you care if those are true or not? (Presumably, most hands are up for “yes.”)
This is where I’d want people to plant their feet, basically to having given this ground floor commitment, because once they have committed to it, it can be the source, the reference, for the cognitive dissonance that will be created when moving from this commitment, to how they have come to accept their religious beliefs.
Once you have them making a public commitment to caring about truth, you can move on to “Ok, what does it look like when we really do care about truth? And what does it look like when people are being careless, acting in disregard for the truth?”
All sorts of (non-religious so as not to directly threaten their beliefs yet) examples from real life can be brought in and examined – e.g. how a court/jury would operate when they aren’t behaving in truth-seeking ways – e.g. assuming the guilt of the defendant as a given, ignoring any counter evidence etc, vs what a truth-seeking court/jury look like. And nailing down *what is it* about the moves of assumption-of-guilt system that betrays it as being careless about getting at the truth?
Planting flags like that. Getting commitments on those flags.
Then, moving through various examples to eventually something closer: describing a woman, “Mary,” in a small cult, who believes the Man at the center of the cult is a divine being who can do no wrong. With the audience one could explore the problem: that no matter where you point to counter-evidence for the idea this cult leader is All Good and Divine, all his dubious, reckless and utterly earth-bound behavior, “Mary” can always reply “But that is only the perspective of limited, sinful mortals –
how can we be in a position to judge The All-Mighty, All Knowing Leader?”
One could engage the audience on this problem: Mary’s beliefs about the cult leader are clearly false or unjustified, and yet she is stuck in a loop of reasoning that will not allow her to GET AT THE TRUTH OF HER ERROR. What will it take for Mary to be able to see her error? (Obviously, she needs to stop question-begging in a vicious circle: she has to be able to step back from what she is assuming, and analyze if it’s a justified belief in the first place, using the same reasoning we’ve built up for examining claims in the discussion so far – what it looks like when you care about truth).
So I see this sort of engaging of the audience along the way so when we finally get to turn to the question of the truth of the audience’s religious beliefs, they have made commitments along the way that they will start noticing or feeling they are violating should they start behaving like the “careless-about-truth” examples already discussed. I’d think there would have to be *some* cognitive dissonance generated with at least someone in the audience, with this approach.
Yes; and that’s the same reason why I think it’s important to establish a baseline of morality with my “Why doesn’t Jesus call 9-1-1?” challenge. Pretty much everybody can agree that they’d call 9-1-1 in an emergency, and those who can’t even be arsed to do that much are reprobates — and most emphatically not paragons and exemplars of moral virtue. So, if we can all agree on that much, where does that leave Jesus?
You’re left either rejecting the notion that good people always call 9-1-1 — not something anybody is likely to do and certainly not something they’d publicly admit — or rejecting the notion that Jesus is either able or willing to call 9-1-1. Which, of course, is what theodicy actually does…but now, having established that you’re a good person and you call 9-1-1 when necessary, you’re really left with no way beyond an unabashed admission of naïve idiocy that those same minimum standards must also apply to Jesus.
b&
Excellent comment, Vaal!
Yes; they learn not only how we think, but how they also approach the same question.
> Do you care more if your beliefs are true – or useful?
I would use “personally convenient” rather than “useful”.
To me, no untrue belief can be genuinely useful. They can appear useful from a safe distance but, if you really act on those beliefs, at some point reality will ensue.
It is convenient to believe you have a fish for this day, but it is not actually nourishing, and if anything the salivating distracts you from actually catching a fish.
Conversely, the main reason science / truth (as far as anyone can determine it) is worth defending is because it is useful. Vaccines and rockets and all that jazz. If it weren’t useful, regardless of truth, it would have the same hobby status as numismatics or bottle cap collecting; after all those deal with true facts as well, which just don’t *do* anything.
On the other hand, that question sort of poisons the well. Think of the sarcastic remark “Oh, how convieeeeeeeenient!”
Maybe not to the believer. Otherwise, untrue beliefs can be incredibly useful!
That’s still a short-term gain. Right-wing demagogues or religious leaders may benefit from keeping the flock dumb and faithful, but that won’t matter much when the earth finally becomes uninhabitable because of climate change denialism.
Yes, the question might invite a pragmatic definition of truth — if it works, it’s more likely to be true — and this can and is used to justify science. But I’m afraid the word “convenient” would just be interpreted too narrowly, and immediately be used to rule out the fact that religious belief can also act as a discipline, making you avoid what’s convenient and do what’s hard. That muddies the waters.
The point is to get the other person to focus on the topic itself — and whether it’s true or not — and not go off on the usual tangent where citing how something “worked” (got me off drugs, gave me hope, made me a better person) is supposed to stand in the same place as being factually accurate. I guess I’m assuming that 9 times out of 10 this is what people will mean by religion “working” or “being useful” — as opposed to prayers curing cancer in well-designed studies.
Well but ‘true’ is often not a binary thing. Accuracy is a range. “If I step out my window, the earth will pull me down” is not technically true but its accurate enough to be useful. I don’t need to know anything about spacetime curvature to form a true-enough-to-be-useful belief about the effects of gravity. How about “glass is a solid?” Very useful when thinking about whether I should dive through it vs. the curtain of water next to it, though its not technically true. And as Ben Goren has been fond of pointing out, for local navigation “the Earth is flat” is a true enough approximation to be useful.
Riffing on the same theme…it is not true that the Earth is flat, but, in our day-to-day lives, it’s very useful to believe that it is. Considering that you’ll still get to your friend’s house on the other side of town if you plot your route using the flat Earth model of the street map or the geodesic model of the globe…but that the map is much easier to fold up and fit in a pocket…well, do you really care that the one is more accurate by a few paces than the other?
This same theme runs throughout all of human experience. It’s not true that Newtonian mechanics is how the Universe operates, but damned few of us will ever personally get our hands dirty with domains where it’s a poor approximation. (Yes, yes — your GPS wouldn’t work if it relied on Newton, but it’s just a magic crystal ball to you; you’re not personally observing the relativistic frame dragging of imperceptible milliseconds of invisible satellites hundreds of miles over your head. And lasers are as flashlights, and so on.)
That’s why the goal we should all strive for is to apportion our beliefs in proportions indicated by a rational analysis of objective observation. When you do that, you believe that Newton and a flat Earth is perfect for visiting your friend — and, simultaneously, that your GPS would be lost if it used Newton and a flat Earth.
So, with all that in mind…religion could, in principle, be an useful false belief that approximates reality to some meaningful degree…but, as it turns out, it fails that test most miserably. There aren’t any gods. The “wisdom” authored by cons and attributed to the gods not only doesn’t stand on its own; it’s responsible for the worst horrors of our story. And this life is the only one you get, so wasting it in the false belief that you’ll get another better one afterwards is the ultimate in counterproductivity.
b&
If religion was a good enough approximation, well, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. I should have said that in terms of methodologies applied to a civilisation more than in terms of individuals. The GPS is a black box to some individuals (well, most technology being a black box to most individuals) is not a terribly relevant factor from that viewpoint. Some people win the lottery, but you don’t know if it’s a good strategy before you gather enough data.
And if religion / supernatural thinking worked as well as science (broadly construed), when averaged over a civ., I would have no probs with it
> How about “glass is a solid?” Very useful when thinking about whether I should dive through it vs. the curtain of water next to it, though its not technically true.
Ironically… no, you defeated your own (correct) point with your own example. The glass flowing down in old windows is a urban legend. The rest of the discussion is semantics; eg.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.html
The solid liquid space is also a continuum. 😛
That said, it is useless to describe glass as liquid, and so nobody ever does, outside of ill-chosen anecdotes.
One should *both* avoid forgetting that most notions are continuous, and avoid the opposite — and fashionable — excess of giving that fact too much importance: just because there is a continuum of redness does not mean I shouldn’t say that RGB 244,0,0 is “red” and reason from there.
Points about religion often being inconvenient as as are well taken. Another word should be chosen. How inconvenient.
I would really, *really*, REALLY, like an edit button. 🙁
“The GPS *being* a … is…”
To clarify, I was answering to Ben, eric, Sastra and Keith, mostly in reverse order.
I am also too tired to type a coherent argument, apparently. Good night.
So you’re actually okay with untrue beliefs being called useful, when they are sufficiently accurate. You think religion is not sufficiently accurate. Is that so? If so, I agree.
Short answer: yes.
Long-winded messy answer that could be reorganised but I have spent too much time on it already:
~~~
Usefulness and accuracy
Beliefs are, to my mind, useful only to the extent that they are accurate (or true).
It is perhaps clearer by contrapositive: strictly less accurate beliefs are necessarily strictly less useful, because at some point somebody will (or let’s even say might, in principle) try to do something new, for which the approximation will be coarse, and fall over the edge of the map.
It’s clear that accurate beliefs are useful, and I just argued the contrapositive of useful implies accurate. So to me they are pretty much the same thing.
~~~
Now to the apparent contradiction with “untrue”:
So long as you stay in the part of the map where the currently most accurate beliefs say that the approximation is good enough, then yes, beliefs that are untrue in the larger map, can be very useful. (I think astronomers still occasionally use epicycles, of all things, in some calculations).
~~~
Maximally accurate to current civ’s knowledge = no grounds to declare untrue.
But my point was more that, were religion the most visibly accurate set of beliefs available (I include methodology in that set; the code is data along with whatever data it generates), I would have no grounds to declare it untrue, regardless how intuitively ridiculous I may find them.
~~~
Tests = power = usefulness
Ultimately, I can think of no other arbiter of truth than empirical tests (Yes: I consider that true of even logic and basic arithmetic.), and that’s what usefulness *is*: the ability to reliably alter outcomes, no matter how slightly. If you can test something, then you can use it. If you use something, then you test it each time you do.
~~~
It works, bitches.
There are plenty of conclusions in science that seem on the face of it as ridiculous as anything religion has to offer, and far more alien. I suck it up because each byte read off my hard drive depends on them being ludicrously accurate.
If there were prayer-powered SSD I might start paying attention 😛
~~~
Where I just don’t get it.
@ Ben,
> and a belief which helps us get something we want — and so it’s only ‘true’ in that sense.
I don’t even get that that’s a sense of “true” at all. But then again I hear phrases like “choosing to believe” which make 0 sense to me so I there are clearly several definitions of those things hanging around.
~~~
End confused ramblings. The management apologises profusely.
One of the most important parts of my original question (“Do you care more if your religion is true or only that it’s useful/convenient/’works’) is for the theist to make a distinction between an accurate belief which reflects reality regardless of what we want — and a belief which helps us get something we want — and so it’s only ‘true’ in that sense. The religious tend to conflate those meanings in their own minds, let alone in apologetics. And yet they’re usually pretty good in recognizing, say, that the Book of Mormon is not necessarily the word of God even if that’s what helped someone get off drugs and leave a life of crime. Things can be wrong but still have good outcomes.
Faith tends to blur this distinction: “I KNOW that the Book of Mormon is TRUE because of what it DID for ME” and so forth. Be grateful and humble. Trust that a positive result points to a divine source. And yet, truth and that sort of usefulness don’t have to be connected.
It’s a question partly designed to shut up personal testimonies, too, which mean nothing. Not a bad beginning then… 😉
I would agree with the flat-earth analogy. It is simpler to conceive of a given area of the earth as ‘flat with bumps on it’ than to try and imagine it as a small piece of an oblate spheroid with bumps on it.
Another example is the Bohr atom, with its ‘electrons’ whizzing round the nucleus in orbit. Quite easy to visualise for the scientific layman, and explains a lot of chemistry, in fact I believe chemists still use it.
Evolution (= variation + natural selection) is another example, I think, where the actual facts are far more complex.
In fact I think I could generalise it: the ‘whole truth’ is often impossibly complex, we need simplified models (hence not 100% ‘true’) in order to comprehend the world around us.
(Religion’s simplified models, though, are often bunk).
cr
This is why some of us say that truth comes in degrees, and this is useful to understand to refute subjectivism.
Although he doesn’t mention it specifically here, the gist is:
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
“Do you care more if your beliefs are true – or useful?”
Exactly!
I tend to agree that lecturing believers is usually fruitless and frustrating, but I’ve liked reading Loftus in the past.
As I’ve gotten older (wiser?), I’ve come to realize that everyone is somewhere on the spectrum of belief-disbelief and nobody can tell which argument or book will speak to them at any given time.
So, what the heck, why not a book telling believers how to defend their faith– although it seems to be some type of ironic Swiftian thesis? Loftus will do a good job and I’m sure it’ll speak to someone somewhere.
A book by an atheist telling Christians “how to defend their faith” (badly or not at all because your beliefs are wrong) is our payback for all those Christians who have written books and articles advising us on “how to be a more likable atheist” (stop telling us our beliefs are wrong.)
We’re all just being friendly.
Yes and Loftus wrote a whole book to help! This is very charitable work.
I can imagine this review in Amazon from someone who took this book the wrong way:
‘A very useful book which has taught me how to up my game in theodicy. Now my atheist neighbor does not even want to talk to me. He says its because I am a moran but I know it is because he is shaken to his very core. When my daughter asked me why God let her pet gerbil die I could explain to her that it was so the gerbil could be with grandma. So this book was very helpful in teaching me that no matter the difficulty of the question or the evidence that the satanist atheists have, there is always a Christian answer if you go with God, walk with God, and talk with God. Now that I have an answer for every question, I can now actually hear God talking back to me. Funny how He sounds exactly like me.’
Funny.
Funny how He sounds exactly like me
LOL!!!
Jerry, if you want to write a snarky sequel to your first book, here’s the title: “How to Defend Creationism: Advice from an Evolutionary Biologist.” I would LOVE to read that.
Jerry, I would like to see your books available as Kindle Editions. I went looking the other day and found none.
I’m pretty sure they’re all on Kindle, at least in the US and Canada. I’m not sure about other countries, but I don’t see why not.
When I checked Amazon (US) there were no Kindle editions listed for WEIT, but just now after seeing your reply, I Googled and the search results bring up a listing for the Kindle edition on Amazon (US) that their own search engine missed.
However, it turns out “This title is not currently available for purchase”, which would be why Amazon was hiding it.
I wonder if it is hiding from customers overseas? Might crank up TunnelBear and see if that makes a difference.
Now, I will have to get this.
Sub
“Or Why I am not a Christian Apologist,” with an implied nod to B. Russell, might’ve made a better subtitle.